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We were recently commissioned to do a big canvas to celebrate someone’s clubbing history. An interesting commission and no doubt about it. Our in-depth quizzing of them revealed that they felt they were getting a little long in the tooth for the kind of shenanigans they used to regularly engage in when they were younger and wanted a little something to commemorate the fact that all those weekends spent wasted weren’t in fact wasted weekends.

Considering what we were trying to convey there were plenty of false starts and aborted designs and I feared this one would languish in development hell until we could come up with something suitable. After percolating in my brain for long enough a quote from comedian Marcus Brigstocke came to mind that would lay the foundations for the design: “If Pac-Man had affected us as kids, we’d all be running around in dark rooms, munching pills and listening to repetitive electronic music.” We were finally off and running.

We then had to come up with some way of celebrating the specific clubs that our commissioner used to frequent. We’ve used QR codesbefore and with the proliferation of smartphones we thought they’d be perfect for our needs. The codes link to classic mixes from the clubs involved and I had to go to a great deal of trouble to find a cassette to digitise from his earliest clubbing days way back in 92. Go ahead and test them (although you may have to click on the pics to bring up versions that are big enough to read). Eagle eyed readers will notice the small Mitsubishi logo concealed in the centre of the QR codes. How delightfully subversive…